His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.